


John Watson is Bittersweet Chocolate

by whattheblazes



Series: The Things They Are [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-17
Updated: 2012-03-17
Packaged: 2017-11-02 02:22:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/363942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whattheblazes/pseuds/whattheblazes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson is bittersweet chocolate, and someday Sherlock Holmes will figure out how to tell him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	John Watson is Bittersweet Chocolate

**Author's Note:**

> Sherlock has difficulty expressing his feelings towards John. This is fluff. Pure fluff. Also, yes, there could be a slight Hobbit reference in here.
> 
> This work is now a series of relationship studies of the couples I ship in Sherlock!

Sherlock detests sweet chocolate. The velvet sugar slicking over his tongue makes his teeth ache, and the dull sheen of it always irritated him, because the chocolate couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be shiny or soft. As a child, Sherlock couldn’t stand that.  
  
Sherlock hates sweet chocolate.  
  
Bittersweet chocolate is more his thing, clean and dark in his nose and between his lips. Bittersweet chocolate has a sharpness behind the sweet that appeals to Sherlock, that reminds him of a certain ex-army doctor with a soft woolly outside and a steel skeleton. An ex-army doctor who can handle a gun as easily as a teapot, and understands that Sherlock is being considerate when he boxes up the body parts in the fridge and when he switches to playing John’s favourite songs on the violin when John wakes up sweating at three in the morning. An ex-army doctor who understands that even when Sherlock’s angry and craving a bitter hit and making his life miserable, he’ll snap back into his sweet self he saves for John soon enough.

An ex-army doctor who believes Sherlock is human no matter what he says.

John's a law unto himself and a world on his own, and Sherlock wants to explore his oceans and the bones of the mountains pressing through John's skin and he wants to lick and taste and _devour_ every inch of John's body and go cave-diving through his head and learn every thought John has, but. But.

Sherlock doesn’t know how to say any of this. He doesn’t believe he’s a sociopath anymore, not since he’d met John and realized he could care, he could  _care_ to the ends of the Earth and back again, but he still hasn’t figured out how to tell John any of this – yet. Not when John’s sweet enough to stay but bitter enough not to forgive Sherlock, since Sherlock is sure, has _deduced_ , that John does not make any great or even trite metaphors in honour of Sherlock inside his skull.

And Sherlock’s got a box inside his skull, a box marked _do not delete – John Watson_ , where everything he’s deduced about John is filed away.

“Alright, mate?” John’s head is tilted towards his bad shoulder, reminiscent of Alexander the Great. To Sherlock, John Watson is more than Hephaestion could have ever been to Alexander and more than Patroclus could have ever been to Achilles, but he acknowledges the parallels in the relationships. Those men, though, never had any identity outside of their counterparts and John is a sweet doctor and a bitter soldier and his own honest man.

Sherlock clears his throat and nods.

“More than,” he says. He feels his lips twitch and his eyes narrow in a real smile, the kind he never allowed himself to use until John. The sweet smile for John, rather than the bitter one for the rest of the world. John smiles softly back at him, and buries his nose back into his blog.

Sherlock curls tighter into himself.

John Watson is bittersweet chocolate and bitter lips at sweet cups of coffee, and his own honest man and some day Sherlock Holmes will figure out how to tell him.

 


End file.
